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I used emacs for decades, but always yearned vi keys/modes (VIPER was alright, but vim has more appeals). I tried spacemacs for a couple of months last year an

by jxy 11y ago

I used emacs for decades, but always yearned vi keys/modes (VIPER was alright, but vim has more appeals). I tried spacemacs for a couple of months last year and realized it was just painful to set it up the way I liked it. I also didn't use most of its "features", and I didn't like helm at all. Spacemacs was just not for me. I ended up return to plain emacs and installed evil and its relatives, and that was a lot easier to get it up and running. I guess if you have no background on elisp or emacs, it might be not that hard to pick up spacemacs. Once you want to customize it nontrivially, you always need to read up the document. For spacemacs, that means you have to read not only emacs and elisp info but also spacemacs documents. It may not be difficult though, but I found that hunting through multiple configuration files to do a trivial change and going through all the things need to be done to add a package was just too much. I believe a simple dot file can go a long way than a multi-direcotry structure that evolves out of your control (occasional breakage in configurations brought by that). The official emacs update is much more conservative and reasonable, and never broke my configurations. Now I guess it is just me. Because the dot file is mine! My precious!

gnuvince 11y ago
I feel the same way; Spacemacs is neat and all, but its core philosophy just rubs me the wrong way. I want my installation of Emacs to have the packages needed to fulfil my own personal needs, no more. I also want to know that if I do nothing to my Emacs configuration, in 10 years my experience will be exactly as it is today. Spacemacs takes the opposite approach and supplies you with more gadgets than you need and the "crowd-configured" aspect of the project means that what you have today and what you have six months from now could be very different. It might be a product of my age (I'm not that old, 32), but I've noticed that I've become more reticent to change in the past few years, especially when it's change that modifies daily habits of mine. With that said, I think that Spacemacs does have good things going for it that I'd like to see trinkle into Emacs eventually. For example, the idea of having keybindings "namespaced" (e.g. 'f' for file manipulations, 'p' for project, etc.) is a great approach to make sense of the dizzying number of commands available in Emacs, and it'd certainly be cool if something like that was introduced into Emacs (in addition to the existing bindings).

by jxy 11y ago

gnuvince 11y ago

I feel the same way; Spacemacs is neat and all, but its core philosophy just rubs me the wrong way. I want my installation of Emacs to have the packages needed to fulfil my own personal needs, no more. I also want to know that if I do nothing to my Emacs configuration, in 10 years my experience will be exactly as it is today. Spacemacs takes the opposite approach and supplies you with more gadgets than you need and the "crowd-configured" aspect of the project means that what you have today and what you have six months from now could be very different. It might be a product of my age (I'm not that old, 32), but I've noticed that I've become more reticent to change in the past few years, especially when it's change that modifies daily habits of mine. With that said, I think that Spacemacs does have good things going for it that I'd like to see trinkle into Emacs eventually. For example, the idea of having keybindings "namespaced" (e.g. 'f' for file manipulations, 'p' for project, etc.) is a great approach to make sense of the dizzying number of commands available in Emacs, and it'd certainly be cool if something like that was introduced into Emacs (in addition to the existing bindings).